I couldn’t actually post this ON Facebook because someone might have thought it was aimed at them, specifically.
I’m devising a new FB test application: answer ten questions and it will tell you whether you are narcissistic, vain, self-absorbed, egotistical, conceited, self-important, self-loving, or merely self-admiring.
Question 1:
`Ssup good looking?
I had a dream about a year ago in which Brian was alive and we were (in parts of the dream) kids. We were playing in the driveway at one point and I accidentally knocked him over. He stopped speaking and began to lose his shape. I dragged him by the feet into a sort of wooden shed that was suddenly, conveniently, nearby. I took an old plane and began to run it up his torso toward what should have been a face. By the time I got there, he was a wooden plank.
There was one part of the newspaper story yesterday that bothered me more than any other: “I’m a writer, a poet and I wrote it out of myself years ago,” he said. “I’ve written this thing so many times it’s almost not my story. It now lives on paper.”
I was misquoted, but only slightly. I mostly said what she wrote. I wish I hadn’t, though.
I was thinking about that as I was trying to fall asleep last night. We need a journal for the waterfall scene and I had volunteered to use Brian’s actual journal from the trip. Chad and Andrew didn’t like that idea for obvious reasons so this morning I’ll walk over to the college bookstore and find something else.
I lay awake for a long time last night thinking about the ways I am shaving him down.
I was late getting to the set this morning because I had to stop off and answer some emails from PSU. When I got there, I bumped into Chad as I was coming out of the elevator and he took me aside for a little chat. He was very gentle. He was a little embarrassed. The bottom line, they were afraid the actors might be a little uncomfortable with me watching them shoot the morgue scene.
I’m not sore. It’s a tough one. It’s based on my poem, The Morgue, and it’s one of the two or three harshest scenes in the script.
So I’m down the hall in one of the university computer labs (wow! EKU has invested in some nice equipment) waiting for them to wrap so we can drive out to the falls for this afternoon’s shoot.
Here’s the poem:
The Morgue
In the room where I walked as quietly as I could, afraid any sudden noise
might precipitate his collapse, I found my brother was still beautiful.
All afternoon, riding to the morgue, I fought the image of him, swollen,
his flesh like dough that’s risen too long, become too light to support its own weight.
The mortician, disapproving of my insistence on seeing my brother
before taking care of business, promised no sign of his `ordeal’
still marred the body, a little bruise maybe, on his throat, where the hook
had caught and dragged him to the surface, and nothing else. Unveiled,
the traces of all his smiling still pulled at the corners of his mouth, for a moment,
I thought how my mother would look on her youngest child, in his coffin,
and know that in life, his smile had been effortless, the natural lay of his face.
But across the sterile basement from where the tips of his hair soothed an illusion
of living into my palm, across the room from where I bent, pressing my ear
to his chest, feeling nothing, except his awful solidity, the chill of his skin,
his hand, nerveless and so much heavier in death, beyond all these things
I glimpsed the slender black hose as it lay draped on a hook, its dull metal spout
blurred by a single thumbprint. This was the hose the man had used to spray
the mud from between my brother’s toes, from the creases in his lips, his teeth
and the folds beneath his tongue. This was the hose that washed his hair, the palms
of his hands, so that on seeing his first dead body, his brother would not know
that this had been a filthy death. This was the hose that rinsed the backs of his thighs,
scoured the debris from his ears and his lashes and his clean white ankles
so that I would not see how he had suffered in the dark water, how his cries had broken
on the hard black shore, how his lungs were soothed with damp leaves, mud
and the sluggish silence of his own isolation. I tried to turn around
in the basement room, to tell the mortician that he had done nice work,
but by then, vomit had pooled in my shirt pockets and on the clean, well-mopped
floor of the basement morgue and in my brother’s open, immaculate hand.
I promised Chad I would not tell his wife, Jen (not one of the several Jens cast in the film), that we went to Dairy Queen twice today. We spent much of the day driving through some real Kentucky. Torrential rains last month meant that several rivers and creeks flooded–there were wrecked trailers and appliances along the banks of almost every waterway we passed.
It was fun, though, to hear and meet some real Kentucky. As we four-wheeled along muddy, washed out roads, Emily told us about her great uncle, “River” Arthur. So named to distinguish him from her Great-Grandfather, “Creek” Arthur. River lived down by the river. Creek lived over by the creek. “We’re all Johnsons named Arthur. We don’t get too creative with names.”
Anyway, River Arthur was walking along the rain-swollen river one day when he saw two pages of a book floating by. He waded out into the brown flood to fetch them back to shore. He read these two pages and liked what there was of the story so much that he walked the creek and river every time it flooded hoping to find the rest.
We even met “Unk Arch’s” uncle, “Unk Junior.” He was in front of us on the tractor as we drove out of Emily’s lane. He had to be 75, naked from the waist up. Half my size and twice my strength. Unk Junior was coming in out of the fields to pick peaches to sell at the farmer’s market on Friday. Emily honked the horn and he pulled over. He grabbed a hoe from the tractor’s fender and waved it menacingly before he smiled wide and walked over to the truck window. He ended many sentences with “I mean you know?” Emily leaned across the passenger seat and spoke out the window, “What’s Aunt Doris up to, Unk? [pronounced 'uh-unk']”
“Oh, I got her workin’ them beans.” He smiled and winked. “You GOT to keep these people workin’.”
We chatted about the floods and the bad roads and the poor tobacco crops. Unk wanted to know if Emily was going to get rich off of these movies so she could lend him some money. It was easy to see why Chad relishes every chance he gets to hang out with these very warm, very colorful characters.
Alas, we couldn’t stand around jawing with Unk Junior all day. We had to go to Dairy Queen. Again. Chad practically cried for it. This DQ featured an important archive of historic Dairy Queen photos from the 1940s and 50s. It also had the Ten Commandments posted above the trash bins.
I’ve mentioned Christine Messina’s fantastic blog, Finding the Qs, on here before. She let me in on the action by sending two of her origami peace cranes with me to Orlando, Florida, for the Redesign Alliance Conference. I loved the cranes–especially this beautiful black one with silver lettering–but I REALLY enjoyed leaving them inserting them in strategic spots for some lucky traveler to find.
Click here to read the details.
If you haven’t seen PSU alum Christine Messina’s blog site, click here to check it out. She’s spreading the word by leaving origami cranes with peace messages in stores and other places. Love the pix, love her voice.
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